Team Apple and Team Nectarine are playing in a sealed 2HG event.
For the first several turns of the game, both teams have summoned several creatures, but never entered combat. Then, Team Nectarine has a Bident of Thassa, with mana open to activate it.
On Team Apple's turn, they play quite a few spells, including tapping out for a large Sphinx's Revelation, then say “go.”. Team Nectarine says “wait, during combat, we activate Bident”. At this point, a judge is called, as Team Apple says that they cast all their spells during their post-combat main phase.
On further investigation, Apple believes that they had cast all their spells in post-combat main, and believes that they had been casting spells in post-combat main on all previous turns.
3 main options spring to mind:
- We do nothing, and leave the game state as-is.
- We rewind the game state to the beginning of combat.
- We declare that the game state is actually in pre-combat main.
They all have fairly significant drawbacks. For (1), Nectarine misses their chance to activate their ability, through no fault or miscommunication on their part. I would say (1) is not an option at all. (2) could be extremely disruptive to the game state, and properly doing the rewind ranges from difficult to nearly impossible. (3) feels like a partial fix.
What are your thoughts on this? Also, while this event is at Regular, would you handle a similar situation at Competitive any differently?
Edit:
While this has similarities to the Desecration Demon / Voice of Resurgence scenario discussed in
http://apps.magicjudges.org/forum/topic/8468/?page=1, we no longer have the option of rewinding and interrupting the shortcut, which was a strong argument for why the demon would necessarily be cast when AP says it was cast.
Edited Talin Salway (April 21, 2014 07:48:13 PM)